July is looking like a big month for pay walls, with The Times and Sunday Times erecting on Friday even bigger barriers than Gannett installed Thursday on three of its newspapers sites.
Steve Outing minces no words in his critique of Rupert Murdoch’s strategy for his London papers (“uber-dumb,” declares his headline), but what I appreciate more is Outing’s hands-on reporting about The Times’ pay wall and the WordPress plug-in introduced by The Guardian.
Outing tested the hardness of the Times’ pay wall and found it very hard, indeed. So much so that only the homepage is visible to non-subscribers. Even Times headlines have disappeared from Google, and content appearing on the paper’s interior sections — Money, Sport, Life, etc. — is all but dead to the rest of us.
Outing’s reporting prompted me to check Google’s treatment of headlines from the three Gannett papers that installed pay walls Thursday. Not quite as bad as the Times of London, it turns out. Headlines from this morning’s Tallahassee Democrat at least show up in a Google search, even if clicking gets non-subscribers no closer to the story behind the headline.
More disconcerting was my discovery that the blog maintained by executive editor Bob Gabordi — the paper’s best hope of engaging readers as they decide whether to subscribe online or not — is now itself behind the pay wall (it also appears to be suffering from a funky headline at the moment, as you’ll see if you click through).
Back in London, I’m intrigued by the syndication system introduced by the Guardian that encourages publications of all sizes, including blogs, to publish Guardian copy in full on their own sites. The benefit to the Guardian is that its advertising gets distributed right along with its content, not to mention increased awareness of its journalism. By way of example, Outing published this Guardian piece on his own blog.
Let’s not leave the world formerly known as Fleet Street without revisiting the ongoing wisdom of the metered approach to pay walls executed so well by the Financial Times. Registered but non-paying readers get 30 articles a month, with a variety of paying options thereafter.
The New York Times has said it will do something like this when it begins charging for its online content next year, and I’ve yet to see an approach that beats the metered way.
One final bit of news from Outing’s blog: his report (mid-way in his post) that the key people hatching the paid content plan for MediaNews Group were laid off last week.
Comments